If asked about monasteries in ancient and medieval India, most of us will think of the Buddhist vihara, with its cloistered monks’ cells surrounding a central courtyard. It may vaguely come to mind that Śaivite maṭhas rose to prominence toward the end of the first millennium, but until now there has been no book to show us their architecture. Among general works, Susan Huntington’s The Art of Ancient India is exceptional in devoting a few pages to the tenth-century monastery and adjacent circular temple at Chandrehe, publishing a plan, and speculating on the beliefs and practices of the Mattamayūra (Drunken Peacock) ascetic sect who inhabited it.1

Not that the handful of surviving related structures is unknown. As Tamara Sears recounts at the opening of her new book, the British archaeologist Alexander Cunningham came across the small monastery at Ranod in 1864–65; at first thinking that it was a palace, he praised it for a simplicity worthy of the Greeks. Chandrehe and the three other Mattamayūra structures that are the focus of this book were all discovered in the next few decades. In parallel, a substantial body of related inscriptions came to light. Better known in scholarly circles than the monuments, the inscriptions speak of the foundation and continuing patronage of the Mattamayūra institutions and give detailed lineages of their gurus.

It is all the more surprising that, until now, there has not been a single sustained study of any group of Hindu monasteries. With this book, Sears has put this building type on the art historical map. She has painstakingly documented the surviving Mattamayūra examples through fieldwork, revealing their architectural typology. Through an impressive mastery of the inscriptional record and Śaiva ritual texts, she has built up a picture of the life of these ascetics, their role …